How to Follow the Teens: a Helpful Guide for Sweet, Clueless Adults

This week, America has become the national equivalent of a drunk dad who’s passed out on the couch after a Super Bowl party. Our children are being forced to clean up our mess.

I speak, of course, of the Parkland shooting survivors and the Never Again movement—literal teenagers, who recently survived an unthinkable assault, and who have somehow still managed to be more efficient, targeted, and effective in calling for gun control than both houses of Congress and the most of the New York Times op-ed section combined.

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The teens are giving speeches. The teens are formulating their opinions. The teens are walking out of high schools, agitating for legislation, and planning a national march for gun control, the March for Our Lives, on March 24. What are you doing, adult America? Reading think pieces? Letting Dinesh D’Souza talk in public again?

This is not helping anybody. We need to wake up, get off the metaphorical couch of our skepticism, and learn how to follow the teens. I made us a guide.

#1: Literally Follow the Teens

There is one concrete benefit to being young for this particularly nightmarish chapter of American history: Teens in 2018 are savvier about digital communications than most trained PR professionals.

The Parkland teens have been communicating with the outside world since the shooting began. David Hogg, a 17-year-old high school senior and student journalist, filmed and broadcast interviews with his classmates while under fire. Now he’s on CNN, calling the NRA "child murderers." Just three days after the shooting, Emma Gonzalez, also 17, delivered a viral speech in which she summarized the contemporary gun control debate and demanded change. Most of us would have still be too traumatized to get out of bed.

As we covered last week, these kids were on Twitter, bitingly refuting right-wing narratives within hours of the shooting. Now, they’re issuing specific calls to action pretty much round the clock.

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Everybody that’s reaching out to us about running your own march- take it in to your own hands like these awesome people.

Seriously aren't politicians supposed to know more then us? How could they ever think letting a generation of voters grow up accustom to school shootings would get them reelected? The #3rdgreatawakening is here.

You have no excuse not to listen to these kids. Look them up. Follow them on social media. Amplify their messages directly, through your own accounts. It’s their voice, not the adult spin, that is actually driving this conversation.

#2: Recognize Their Expertise

Columbine, the first widely covered school shooting, happened in April 1999. The average student in the Class of 2018 was born in 2000. This means two things: First, yes, you are actually that old. Second, we are looking at the first generation of children raised in a post-Columbine world.

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The Parkland teens, like most American teens, have always had to cope with the knowledge of a possible school shooting. Active shooter drills and the general sense that they could be murdered in the middle of an AP Math class have always been part of their education. We live in a country where five-year-olds are taught to “run around, shout and throw things” if a shooter opens fire on them—not because it improves their odds of survival, but because if the shooter has to spend time chasing these particular five-year-olds, the students in other classrooms might be able to flee.

Gun violence is baked into these kids’ lives. They know that the “safety measures” we’ve created—safety drills, reporting suspicious behavior, throwing books at men with loaded assault rifles—don't do a damn thing unless we get rid of the assault rifles themselves.

#3: Stop Looking for Puppeteers

This one's for the crazies: It is frankly embarrassing that I have to remind grown men that these kids know what they’re talking about. And yet, I do. Because one too common reaction has been to claim that these children have been coached or paid or scripted—or that they're just too grief-stricken to know what they’re talking about.

The big question is: should the media be promoting opinions by teenagers who are in an emotional state and facing extreme peer pressure in some cases?

One aide to a Florida state representative claimed they were “not students here but actors that travel to various crises when they happen.” Tucker Carlson raised the issue on his show, reminding his audience that some have said the teens "are in some way in contact with organized anti-gun groups" and charging that "[the media] is using these kids in a kind of moral blackmail." Bill O’Reilly thinks they’re all deranged by “peer pressure.”

And you don't have to be a conspiracy theorist or goblin person to underestimate teens. People assume these kids to be the puppets of outside forces because it's hard for them to believe that 17-year-olds are bright enough to be this effective or articulate. We assume some adult has to be pulling the strings because we don’t respect young people. It’s the same reason the media companies of America have paid out thousands or millions of dollars for think pieces about how young people will die homeless because they spend too much on toast.

To be fair, some young people assume that old people are stupid. Every generation wants to believe that its their generation that will save the world. But this is not an episode of Saved By the Bell: Kids don’t have all the answers and grown-ups aren’t all dimwitted, out-of-touch squares. Teens can be irresponsible. But so can adults. Some adults are Tucker Carlson, and that’s a legitimate tragedy in its own right.

But believe it or not, this generation of teens—which is currently showing out in support of the Parkland survivors in massive numbers and many of whom will likely participate in a planned national high school walk-out on March 14—is well-informed and highly motivated around the issue of gun control, and they are more than equipped to agitate for better legislation. We need to trust these kids enough to take them at their word. If they’re in touch with other organizers, great! They’re not helpless, empty-headed vessels for outside agendas. They’re activists. And working in coalitions is what good activists do.

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#4: Learn to Take Direction

No matter what Bill O’Reilly thinks, these kids are not acting out in blind grief. They are well-organized. They are making clear, specific, reasonable demands. In the March for Our Lives mission statement, they want “to demand that a comprehensive and effective bill be immediately brought before Congress to address these gun issues.” More specifically, they are asking people to march, and to donate to the march, in order to help them put pressure on lawmakers.

This is all laid out on the website, in heartbreakingly straightforward language. Young as they may be, these kids do not need adults to tell them what they really want or how they can actually resolve the situation. They’ve assumed the leadership role, and thus far have proven they deserve it. Leaders need followers, and we can fulfill that role.

#5: Get Over Yourself

David Brooks, as usual, has contributed yet one more memorable little nugget to the think piece economy. We must “respect” gun owners, he declared in a recent New York Times op-ed, for only when we stop hurting their feelings will they lead us all to a gun-free Utopia! “If you want to stop school shootings it’s not enough just to vent and march. It’s necessary to let people from Red America lead the way, and to show respect to gun owners at all points,” Brooks explains.

Thinking that the obstacle to better gun control legislation is individual gun owners is willfully naive.

The problem is not that some people own guns. The problem is that there is a well-organized, well-funded lobbying organization, the NRA, which floods the national discourse with anti-gun-control propaganda and donates massive amounts of money to politicians to make sure meaningful gun control legislation does not get passed. The problem is not that individual gun owners haven’t had their hearts touched yet. It’s that structural corruption has led politicians to knowingly endanger their constituents. Structural change requires structural solutions. This isn’t a problem won't be solved by door-to-door requests to have gun owners in America politely acknowledge that, yes, child murder is bad.

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#6: Be a Grown-Up

On CNN, David Hogg delivered a clear message on the role of youth activism here—and in turn, the role of responsive adult action.

“We're children," 17-year-old Hogg said on CNN in the aftermath of the shooting. “[Lawmakers] are the adults. You need to take some action and play a role. Work together. Come over your politics and get something done."

“If you have any heart, or care about anyone or anything, you need to be an advocate for change,” said his classmate Christine Yared. “Don’t let any more children suffer like we have. Don’t continue this cycle.”

It is monstrous—what we have done to this nation’s children in the name of preserving the Second Amendment. I do not know how we live with ourselves.

In our refusal to pass common-sense gun control laws, we have given our children an impossible burden to bear. It is monstrous—what we have done to this nation’s children in the name of preserving the Second Amendment. I do not know how we live with ourselves.

But I do know, America, that the idea our children should have to accept that we've imperiled their lives through pure negligence is abusive by definition. We need to listen to the teens. We need to follow the teens. We need, frankly, to be more like the teens. Emma Gonzalez is organizing and communicating with moral clarity that I, a 30-something woman, have never managed.

But we cannot expect the teens to solve this problem for us. It's just like Hogg said. We're the grown-ups. It is our one job to solve problems for children, for future generations. We cannot sit still and applaud them or even join their protests and then fail to pass the legislation they’ve demanded.

If a high school student can plan a gun control rally, so can you. If someone who just survived a shooting can make a trip to the state capitol to confront legislators, so can you. It’s not just about doing what they ask. It’s about standing with survivors of mass shooting and joining them to create change.

This piece has been updated to reflect that while Tucker Carlson did mention that there have been suggestions of ulterior motives behind the teen survivors' activism on his show, he did not explicitly endorse those theories.

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